Prime minister urged to focus on better access to education for poorer students as she prepares to release funding reviewTheresa May has been warned against damaging disadvantaged students’ access to university in order to fund a tuition fees cut that has been described as “a sop to classic Tory voters”.The prime minister is under pressure to rule out allowi […]

If you pay attention when you’re a learning receptor unit you may grow up to become a couranteerIf you thought that pretentious job titles were a modern phenomenon, the creation of HR department staff with too much time on their hands, think again.Dr Alun Withey, a historian at the University of Exeter, has shown that the Victorians can take the credit for b […]

Government is not only failing to heal the education and property rift separating the millennials from the rest of Britain. It is making it widerSocial and demographic changes are usually, by their nature, gradual. Wars and conscription aside, it is very rare that being born 10 years earlier or later will make a profound difference to where someone ends up i […]

Guardian supporter Emilio Battaglia explains how an opinion piece by Tobias Jones clarified his view of bilingualism’s power to build bridgesEmilio Battaglia, 72, is a teacher and translator from Milan, Italy. He has been living and working in Toronto, Canada, since 1995. As someone who has dedicated so much of his life to the study and exploration of langua […]

In school fields and communities, pupils are learning about the fragility of nature – and restoring depleted environments After the long slog of winter, pupils at Evelyn Community primary school in Merseyside are getting outside with a mission in mind: to count and record the number of different bird species in the school grounds. The challenge is part of th […]

Hmmm, if Mr Gove has said that the Coalition wishes to improve education for everybody, I fail to see how handing out £6,000 to individual parents will do this.

Perhaps a better route would be to provide better teaching and pastoral care for children in all schools. Sound familiar? It should, it was all over the Press last week in relation to OFSTED’s controversial report (which everybody seems to have forgotten about) about special needs. Now, surely if improved teaching and pastoral care is good enough to improve standards for children with SEN, it should also be good enough for everybody else.

If we were to go ahead with this scheme, how would we identify or assess those suitable? What if everybody wanted £6,000 per child? Mr Falconer, I’ve got no objection to private schools existing. I have no objection to parents purchasing either a better standard of education (or social exclusivity) for their offspring. However, in these days of austerity I have to say that there are many many institutions and organisations more worthy of a £6,000 freebie per child than yours.

Furthermore, it is our experience that private schools don’t really want children with SEN, or want to charge higher fees to cover TA’s and specialised teaching. Some of their SEN policies make dark threats to ask children to leave if SEN is identified and they believe parents have withheld this information.

Any head teachers out there? Would this not be an administrative and funding nightmare? How would you go about extricating £6,000 from your funding scheme once a child’s parents decide to place them in the private sector?